Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Maddow on the election

In my last post I linked to Rachel Maddow's election reporting. Since it contained much, much more than just a brief mention of Silver's electoral accuracy I decided to give it a post of its own. She starts by noting what we're not going to have as a result: 1) a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade; 2) health reform repeal; 3) the end of Medicare; 4) a 20% tax cut for the rich; 5) a cut in food stamps and kids' insurance to pay for #4; 6) employer clearance for birth control under their insurance plan; 7) redefine rape; 8) Constitutionally prevent marriage equality; 9) double Guantanamo; 10) eliminate the Departments of Energy, Housing or Education; 11) spend $2 trillion on the military for programs it doesn't even want; 12) cut student loans; 13) vetoing the Dream Act; 14) self-deportation; 15) let Detroit go bankrupt; 16) start a trade war with China; 17) going to run down a scared gay kid and cut his hair; 18) no Secretary of State John Bolton; 19) bring Dick Cheney back; 20) have foreign policy advisers for the Iraq war. These are all the things we would have had if Romney had won.

The case she makes is that all of these things are very much like how wrong they were about the election results. How regressives live in a bubble of ideology cut off from not only the facts but from the majority of the American people and what they say they want in polls. All of the above are policies not favored by most, and yet that's exactly what we would have gotten with the regressives. And make no mistake, they will still push for those things without again buying into any factual basis, since they refute the bubble they have created. The House is still controlled by the regressives and they will still kill any Bills helping the people while pushing for the exact agenda we see above. They will not take the election results as an obvious refutation of that agenda, instead creating hallucinatory fantasies as to why the election did not go their way.

Just as the regressive pundits were grossly wrong, every one, and are still denying it (with a few rare exceptions), they will continue to deny the mandate of the people just as they continue to deny climate change. Our problems are far from over given their House control, but things could have been disasterous had not Obama won a 2nd terms and the Senate not picked up 2 more progressive seats. Still, the Senate regressives will no doubt continue to filibuster at every turn, clogging up the system so that nothing gets done for the public. I am grateful though that all the agenda items above we're not going to have not due to the will of the people.